Anatol Lieven, right or wrong?

Many liberals will find Anatol Lieven’s book America Right or Wrong: an anatomy of American nationalism a refreshing read: in smooth style, Lieven impressively articulates familiar arguments against United States foreign policy since 9/11 – especially, but not exclusively, in the middle east.

Lieven employs a formidable armoury of qualities: wit and sarcasm, a knowledge of his critics that enables him often to pre–empt their likely counter–jibes; and frequent (albeit tactical) empathy for opposing views, which reveals a genuine attempt to diagnose the illnesses of US foreign policy and propose remedies.

openDemocracy publishes two exclusive extracts from Anatol Lieven’s anatomy of American nationalism:

• “America right or wrong” (September 2004)
• “Israel and the American antithesis” (October 2004)

But wit, rhetoric, and sarcasm – even when spiced with empathy – are ingredients for sermons and motivational literature, not rigorous analysis; and in the end America Right or Wrong is nothing more than preaching to the choir.

In his book, Anatol Lieven targets what might be called the usual suspects: the pro–Israel lobby, the neo–conservatives, the Christian right, and anyone disagreeing with his worldview. His solutions are equally predictable: the United Nations, liberalism, international law, a broader role for Europe, and settling the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by pressing Israel into more concessions.

These simplicities come into their own in the last full chapter of his book, “American Nationalism, Israel and the Middle East”. Here, Lieven’s argument is trite and old: nationalist Israel is a danger, primarily to itself; Palestinian terrorism is unlike al–Qaida and therefore deserves understanding; and anti–semitism is a bogey – those waving it are either paranoid or manipulative, it is a marginal phenomenon even in the Arab world, and what there is will fade once Israel leaves the territories.

The conclusion follows: if only Israel – and its uncritical American supporters –could mend its ways, the ensuing peace would pave the way to more effective policies to face the region’s problems, above all terrorism.

A failure of liberalism

The immediate question raised by Lieven’s argument relates to the defence of dissent that should be at the heart of liberalism. The Arab states and the Palestinian cause are responsible for a litany of abuses of basic civil and human rights: a lack of basic freedoms, oppression of women, criminalisation of homosexuality, widespread use of torture, active support and moral justification for terrorism, discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities, and the systematic persecution of dissent.

How, in short, can one be a liberal and broadly support the Arab world and the Palestinian cause in their grievances against the United States and Israel, two states which, with all their shortcomings, embody many classic liberal values and ideals?

Here, Lieven is hardly persuasive. He labels those liberals who happen to disagree with him – like Alan Dershowitz or Paul Berman – as “self–described liberals”; the qualifier is justified by their support for Israel, their characterisation of Islamic radicalism as “Islamofascism”, and their view of the present crisis as a war of ideas counterposing the free world against a new form of totalitarianism.

Lieven probably has a persuasive explanation for his preference, as do Dershowitz and Berman for theirs. He cites anti–colonialist feelings and the sense of grievance pervading the Arab world. He is right, but this pervasiveness neither justifies nor explains the crimes and horrors committed by post–colonial Arab regimes; liberals with anti–colonialist feelings should not be blind to the ubiquitous illiberalism of the Arab world just because of the west’s colonial past.

This puts the question about dissent and liberalism in a new light. Who is the real “self–described” liberal – Berman, Dershowitz, or Lieven himself? Lieven is free to disagree, he can easily formulate a good counter–argument, but his dismissive labelling of dissenters betrays dogmatism. For Lieven, they are “self–described” not because they are not liberals, but because they disagree with him: hardly an expression of liberalism.

Paul Berman’s and Alan Dershowitz’s case is symptomatic, and not only because Anatol Lieven’s discussion of Israel and the middle east conveniently quotes mostly Jewish sources as if the entire matter of US policy in the region impinges principally upon Jews. In a book that obsessively refers to the pro–Israeli lobby as the prime mover of things (whereas Arab pressure–groups are unmentioned) it is hardly surprising that the author’s worldview reflects the misguided, and dangerous, belief that the future of the middle east ultimately depends on what Jews and Israel will or will not do.

It may be significant that Lieven conveniently ignores Christopher Hitchens – perhaps the most glaring defector from the “left” consensus – a writer who is neither a Jew nor someone who deserves the disparaging qualifier “self–described”. But that is precisely the point: Hitchens, a former Trotskyist with strong left–liberal credentials, no sympathy for Ariel Sharon, and no love for the right, is as far from Lieven’s worldview as Berman and Dershowitz are.

Lieven’s language does not reflect a nuanced awareness of the complexities of the issues at stake. He systematically discredits opponents to dismiss their arguments, painting them as caricatures of themselves. “Bush country”, the Christian right, and pro–Israel sentiment – all are the object of much derision and little illumination. He deems America simply to be wrong, and dismisses dissenters with no hearing. A liberal who decries the polarised moral vision of George W Bush does not offer any advance in wisdom by inhabiting an equally Manichaean world. The real task is to appreciate that the moral difficulties and dilemmas we all face, liberals and conservatives alike, offer no easy answers.

Lieven’s inability to cope with dissent – his failure of true liberalism – is at the root of the permeating dogmatism of his argument. An ability to respond to complexity and dissent with seriousness might lead Lieven to the realisation that America’s foreign policy is not necessarily dictated by a cocktail of American and “chauvinist” Israeli nationalism.

It is possible (for example) to be a liberal and to have supported war in Iraq in spring 2003; to be a liberal and to support Israel; to be a liberal who is horrified at Abu Ghraib and still approve of Saddam’s overthrow; to be a liberal who sees a difference between Abu Ghraib (an aberration that will be prosecuted) and Saddam’s reign of fear (a state–sanctioned system of torture and mass murder). In truth, the argument over current American foreign policy divides the liberal community. These are serious liberal arguments and serious liberal dilemmas. Lieven’s dismissal of opponents is neither serious nor liberal.

In the labelling game, one more thing emerges. Anatol Lieven’s got this thing for Jews. His obsession, mostly latent, occasionally comes to the surface. Referring to Washington Times columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, Lieven mentions that de Borchgrave is “in part of Jewish descent”, as if ethnic origin somehow makes opinions more or less valid.

Lieven uses de Borchgrave’s origins to support his own arguments: this Jew agrees with him, making his Jewishness a crucial asset that validates Lieven’s viewpoint. But if being Jewish lends legitimacy to opinions (itself a highly questionable implication), why is Jewish descent good only when Lieven agrees with de Borchgrave but not good when other Jews disagree with Lieven? Lieven labels Melanie Phillips a “British Jewish journalist” and Phyllis Chesler a “Jewish liberal American feminist” to insinuate the partisan nature of their support for Israel, and thus discredit their writings in its favour.

Why in these cases too is it necessary to know their ethnic affiliation and religious persuasion? The point is that being Jewish is immaterial to an opinion’s validity. Reference to ethnic origin should never appear in a serious polemic: ideas are at stake, not the skin–colour, religious beliefs, gender, sexual inclinations or ethnic origin of our supporters and opponents. To make these factors relevant to arguments reflects an intellectual confusion that dangerously borders on prejudice. Lieven’s discrediting efforts are grave enough when he labels opponents for their ideas, graver still when the label refers to their ethnic or religious affiliation.

A flawed view of the middle east

What of Lieven’s views on wider matters of peace in the middle east? On a central issue, Lieven is right: peace will come only through territorial compromise. But he errs in assuming that this compromise can only follow United States pressure on Israel, and in claiming that US support for Israel only worsens the situation in the region. In the end, Israel’s many mistakes notwithstanding, the main impediment to peace is the inability of Palestinian and Arab nationalism to come to terms with a non–Arab sovereign presence in their midst.

No, the United States should not pressure Israel. It should pressure the Arab world to take responsibility for its pitiful condition: the lack of human development, the inept elites that dominate its politics, the social injustice that feeds into terrorism, the failure to produce viable governance and economy. The US should confront the Arab world with the need to take responsibility and make choices. This embrace of responsibility, not even more evasion of it, is what the region desperately needs today from its leaders and citizens alike.

His approach on this point means that Lieven “essentialises” the Arab side and denies it agency in relation to past and current events. Blaming the victims for their own suffering leaves the perpetrators, and the socio–political and ideological milieu that gives rise to their murderous intents, without responsibility. This patronising approach is revealed in the way that Lieven expects only America and Israel to change, and mend, their ways; his demand for a different course of action from the Arab world is, by contrast, perfunctory – theirs is an inevitable, almost mechanical reaction to events.

Lieven would probably object to these last remarks, invoking (as his book does) the Arab League’s 2002 initiative on the Israeli–Palestinian issue. But he would be wrong, for three reasons.

First, the Arab League initiative left the refugee issue open (here, Lieven sides, surprisingly, with Israel).

Second, the initiative was hijacked by the Passover massacre which killed forty Jews on the eve of one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar – yet the Arab League did not condemn Hamas (after all, the prime mover of the initiative was Saudi Arabia, a key Hamas financial supporter), but denounced Israel’s military response instead.

Third, when in May 2003 the Aqaba summit included reference to Israel’s right to exist as “a Jewish state”, the Arab establishment and Arab intellectuals loudly protested.

A misunderstanding of American foreign policy

Anatol Lieven’s critique’s is most glaringly flawed in relation to changes in America’s foreign policy in the middle east after 11 September 2001. Before that date, America was a status quo power in the region, intent on dual containment vis–à–vis Iran and Iraq and connivance with authoritarian regimes. At least one of these regimes (like Saudi Arabia) were intimate allies selling oil and investing trillions of dollars in western economies and western ambassadors; some (Egypt, Jordan and Morocco) were friends and recipients of generous aid; others (like Syria) could be persuaded to become friends to improve the other policies.

America’s policy of dual containment was an abject failure: daily images of Iraqis suffering from the post–1991 sanctions regime were beamed into Arab homes for a decade, while the US was bombing Iraqi targets and enforcing no–fly zones over Iraq, but Saddam Hussein survived in power. Elsewhere, US–backed tyrants depleted their countries’ resources to fund extravagant lifestyles while repressing their domestic opposition, thus preventing the rise of an Arab civil society and leaving radical Islam as the only remaining organised social and political force. Arab regimes then brutally crushed the Islamists as they had crushed communists decades before, and the ensuing hatred for the regimes’ main patron, the United States, simmered quite independently of the dynamics of the Palestinian–Israeli peace process.

Islamic radicalism has deep historical rhythms of its own that predate and will long outlive Osama bin Laden. In the face of its recent manifestations, Lieven may well argue that American foreign policy is responsible for sins of omission and occasional commission. But to underplay its other dimensions, as he does – Saudi funding, Pakistani connivance, the self–inflicted wounds of a region that democracy has largely passed by, the dark seduction of Islamism itself at a particular moment in history – suggests that Lieven, in his urge to excoriate America’s ignorance and hubris, himself has plenty of both.

Lieven lambasts the United States’s backing for Israel on the grounds that America’s commitment to democracy – which he cites as a reason for strong US–Israeli relations – clashes with Israel’s occupation policies, thus undermining US advocacy of democratisation elsewhere in the middle east. But he does not apply the same logic to America’s close ties with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and the Gulf principalities. Here, there is no suggestion that US aid and arms sales to these Arab countries compromises the US’s democratic credibility in Arab and Muslim eyes.

America’s “realism” before 9/11 was interest–driven, unsentimental and brutal; it was devoid of the romance, the illusions of democratisation and the benign imperialism that Lieven now criticises. Along with its annual aid to Israel, America’s generous aid packages to Egypt and Jordan (including the latter’s debt–cancellation in 1994) were stabilising mechanisms meant to strengthen middle–east peace, yet another pillar of US foreign policy in the region. The price was support for authoritarian regimes whose treatment of their subjects was not exactly in harmony with America’s commitment to democracy elsewhere.

Lieven’s approach would imply that for America to be true to its democratic principles and avoid moral incoherence, it should stop supporting its undemocratic middle–eastern allies, even impose sanctions on them or deny them aid until they reform. This would presumably apply even more to unfriendly regimes like Iran, where Lieven regrets the US refusal to engage with Tehran. If America sought confrontation with Iran, the region might descend into chaos, which Lieven would eventually blame on America; but who would pay the price of such absolute consistency of democratic principle?

Lieven decries America’s support for Ariel Sharon’s policies in crushing the second Palestinian intifada and America’s present lack of involvement in peacemaking. But in doing so, he forgets recent history: solving the Arab–Israeli conflict was also a pillar of US foreign policy, and the deep American involvement in peacemaking (itself an ongoing commitment at least since the 1950s) was shipwrecked in 2000 mainly by Palestinian intransigence. America’s disengagement in 2001 was the consequence, not cause, of diplomatic failure.

It is easy to decry American nationalism and warn against its association with what Lieven calls, without much explanation, “a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism”. But the collapse of the peace process, to which two successive US administrations devoted ten years and much of their prestige, happened during the tenure of two of the least nationalist or chauvinist rulers, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak.

Moreover, Barak’s negotiating teams included the most liberal Israelis of any negotiating cycle – Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, Shlomo Ben–Ami and Uri Savir. The process still blew up in their (and Bill Clinton’s) faces. To advocate now a return to the policies of the 1990s is not merely an unrealistic aspiration for current or future US leaders and policies; it involves a real failure of historical imagination.

Israel’s settlement policy was, and remains, a huge impediment to peace. But a balanced observer could not possibly reduce the failure of the peace process only to one factor: this is essentialising.

A fair observer would at least include Palestinian terrorism – and terrorism did not start with the intifada, or the Oslo process, but long precedes Israel’s conquests.

An acute observer would also add Yasser Arafat’s ambiguities with terror organisations such as Hamas. His pandering to Islamist audiences and Arab nationalists – for example his 1994 Johannesburg speech which qualified Oslo as a ruse – might have equally contributed to the collapse of the peace process.

But Lieven is not balanced, fair nor acute.

A misreading of anti–semitism

The fact that Lieven is pushing an ideological agenda successfully rehearsed only among like–minded people shows best in his treatment of anti–semitism. Lieven is right to dismiss more extreme accounts of the phenomenon that view today’s Europe as little–changed from the 1930s. This, however, does not imply that anti–semitism poses no threat; and Lieven seems unaware that between Auschwitz and a truly tolerant society there are infinite shades of grey.

Lieven falters on anti-semitism. He condemns it, true, and he recognises that it exists. But he then dismisses the vast amount of literature identifying and diagnosing it as a paranoid reaction meant to censor legitimate criticism of Israel. A serious approach to the problem would have tried to identify those forms of criticism that are legitimate - and thus attacking them on grounds of anti-semitism is disingenuous - and those forms of criticism which exploit old anti-semitic tropes to foment hostility toward Israel and its Jewish supporters in the west.

There is much of the former, but just as much, if not more, of the latter going around. Lieven’s contribution is thus lamentable, because it only helps dismissing the problem as a form of Jewish hysteria and will push even many Jews who are uncomfortable with Israel’s current policies to defend the Jewish state no matter what.

Lieven’s treatment of anti–semitism in the Arab world further proves his lack of understanding of the problem. Though he censures the phenomenon, he cautiously suggests the solution is simple: “This tendency must be combated as part of general efforts to bring peace to the Middle East, to improve its level of education and public discourse, to lay the foundations for democracy and help it develop in other ways – and in Europe to help integrate…Muslim immigrants into Western society.”

This is all very well, but given Lieven’s scepticism about efforts to bring democracy to the region, how much time must pass before the ugly spread of medieval anti–semitism can be reversed? For Lieven, most incidents in Europe involve disgruntled Arab and Muslim immigrants who have reacted against “what they saw as Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians…Their views of these atrocities were exaggerated; but equally, their criminal behaviour was a response to events as well as the product of a warped intellectual background.”

If the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was settled, and Europe’s problems of integration solved, anti–semitism will vanish, Lieven seems to suggest. But Europe’s Jews also see violent acts committed against Jews in Israel and elsewhere (including Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians, attacks on synagogues and cemeteries, atrocities like the beheading of Daniel Pearl).

But if European Jews responded to attacks on them by burning mosques, desecrating Muslim cemeteries, or attacking Muslims in subways, would Lieven be inviting the “understanding” he seeks in relation to anti–semitism? One hopes not: humans, at least those who believe in freedom, are free agents and thus have a choice. Those who choose to vent their anger through acts of violence inspired by ancient prejudices must be held responsible for their crimes and offered no attenuating circumstances or “understanding”.

Anti–semitism thrives in today’s Arab states – the only place in the world where the old forgery of the Protocols became a popular TV series and where Holocaust denial enjoys academic status. Anti–semitism has also found legitimacy in many European forums, some of which are not as extreme and marginal as Lieven believes. Its appearance should not be dismissed as a transient phenomenon. Rather, it should be condemned forcefully and the effort made to seek to distance a worthy cause – Palestinian self–determination – from the stain of prejudice.

A blindness over nationalism

Lieven’s underestimation of anti–semitism is no surprise in the light of his characterisation of nationalism, which is unreservedly negative. This has a direct bearing on his approach to Israel: for he sees Israel’s occupation as both the result of nationalism and the cause of anti–semitism.

However, anti–semitism cannot be dismissed as an offshoot of anti–colonialism, or the product of Zionist settlement. Arab nationalism, after all, has historically been hostile to the national aspirations of indigenous people in the region who are not Arabs or Muslims. The Kurds (hardly a European settler population), the Copts in Egypt, the Berbers in north Africa, and Sudan’s non–Arab and non–Muslim peoples are only a few examples.

Arab nationalism was never open to competing national claims, and remains uncompromising to this day, regardless of whether the opposing nationalism is indigenous. Even had Jews been a majority in Palestine before Zionism, their aspirations would (like Kurdish nationalism) have clashed with the chauvinist nature of Arab nationalism, because Arab nationalism did – and does not now – recognise the rights of national minorities in its midst.

Lieven’s portait of nationalism as chauvinist might be expected to lead him to condemn Palestinian nationalism as well, and to advocate a post–nationalist middle east: after all, that is the basis of his criticism of American and Israeli nationalisms. But on Palestinian nationalism he is silent.

Lieven argues that: “More than any other factor, it is the nature and extent of this nationalism which at the start of the twenty–first century divides the United States from a largely postnationalist Western Europe.” This is surely correct, especially (if not entirely) when in defining western Europe as post–nationalist, although Europe’s “post–Christian” dimension also reveals the growing chasm between the United States and Europe.

But what Lieven misses is that the romantic vision of a post–nationalist world to which many Eurocrats and European liberals subscribe is not what isolates the United States from the rest of the world – the latter, in Lieven’s mind, is still very much Europe and little else – but what isolates Europe from the rest of the world. Even apart from the Middle East, nationalism is still a dynamic force in Russia (Lieven’s more familiar ground), the Indian sub–continent, Latin America, south–east Asia and in particular parts of Europe. It has lost its grip only in liberal Europe, and liberal Europe as usual wants to shape the world in its own image.

Anatol Lieven sees Europe’s post–nationalist identity as a response to the pernicious nature of nationalism, which sealed Europe’s tragic fate in the 20th century; and as opening the way to an era of prosperity and peaceful coexistence. But this no doubt accurate diagnosis of European success is not applicable to the middle east, or to American policy there.

Lieven is right to comment that: “The Western European elites…essentially decided that the correct response to Nazism and to the hideous national conflicts which preceded, engendered and accompanied it was to seek to limit, transcend and overcome nationalism.” As a result, Europeans look at Zionism with condescension and growing impatience, and demand that Zionist Israel and those still supporting it see the dangers inherent in nationalism, and make the effort to transcend it.

But this is not Israel’s problem with nationalism, it is Europe’s (and Lieven’s) problem with nationalism: the inability to understand that what did not work for Europe works for others. That is today’s challenge in the middle east – not to transcend nationalism, but to foster a form of nationalism that is not exclusive, racist, aggressive and chauvinist.

Here is the missing component of Lieven’s argument. For Israel to transcend nationalism following a European post–nationalist model, Israel would need a middle–east region that is ready, like Germany and France in post–1945 Europe, to do the same. Nobody seems ready for that, east of Jerusalem. Indeed, how can the Palestinians be expected to transcend national aspirations they have not yet realised, in order to embrace a European model with no assurance of success outside Europe?

Europe has a further problem with nationalism. Nationalism is not only a dark, negative, exclusive force, defined by “its ability to feed off a very wide range of other resentments, loyalties, identities, hopes and fears”. Nationalism is also an expression of identity, what some collective population chooses to be. It is love of the land, a sense of community, a bonding based on common stories, common memories, solidarity and a feeling of a shared fate, and a fondness for similar things.

Lieven rightly dismisses the debate about the birth of a Palestinian national consciousness: what matters now is that a strong national identity has taken roots. But he does not similarly recognise that on the Jewish side a similar process has occurred, that Zionism is not merely a product of survival instincts, what Lieven calls “the understandable but deplorable choice” made by Jewish intellectuals after 1945 in favour of nationalism.

Nationalism succeeds where there is a nation to embrace it. Artificial identities – as is currently the case with European identity – fail to develop if they fail to persuade. Thus, it was not just a tragic imperative that drove Jews to embrace nationalism, the culmination of a decades–long process of growth of national consciousness, whereas Europeans recoiled from it in fear.

What distinguishes the Jewish national cause in the last six decades, and what drove and drives many Jews across the world to identify with and support Israel, is the inner logic of a nation–based identity – not the cosmopolitan and assimilated acculturation that distinguishes those Jews whom Lieven frequently consults and sentimentally invokes. Israel is valued not for its policies – on which Jews and Israelis disagree and will continue to have robust arguments – but for its very existence and what it means to most Jews.

An old adage suggests that it takes two to tango. Lieven has plenty of dancing wisdom to offer America, Israel and their supporters, but none for their dancing partners. Are there any? Under what circumstances will they dance? Should America force them to dance? Should it teach them the steps? Should it walk away if they refuse to engage? Shouldn’t they be the ones, initiating the dance? And who’s to blame, if they do not tango in the end?

Lieven does not say, primarily because he fails to ask. And it is that failure to ask the right questions that ultimately makes this book hardly inspiring. Choosing sides, as well as policies, in the current global predicament is a matter of preferences and priorities, as such choices reflect a complex world of difficult, tragic and often impossible dilemmas, where some values are sacrificed over others in a prioritising game that will never do full justice to lofty ideals. Lieven’s tirades do no justice to these complexities and thus offer little choice and little comfort.